Accountability is often misunderstood. It is not punishment, not the healthy kind.

It can include consequences. It should include consequences when people violate trust, abuse power, lie, steal, exploit, endanger others, or keep breaking commitments after every reasonable opportunity to adjust.

But accountability itself is not the firing squad. It is not revenge in a leadership costume. It is not public humiliation. It is not the strong crushing the weak because they can.

That is not...

Having experienced relationship rifts with family members, the question comes up why attempts at reconcilation rarely stick. I'm not saying, don't try, but we're dealing with an iceberg; surface issues and a whole lotta stuff waiting under the surface to poke a hole in the boat.

Here are the issues under the surface that lurk, waiting to sink your reconciliation boat.

1. The Reunion Becomes the Goal, Not the Repair

Families treat reconciliation like a destination rather than a process. The...

There's a story about a man who left a rigid fundamentalist community after twenty years. When someone asked him what finally made him walk out the door, he said, "I realized I'd met the same person in four different religions."

He wasn't talking about a specific individual. He was talking about a type.

Eric Hoffer saw it coming. In 1951, the San Francisco dockworker and self-taught philosopher published The True Believer, a slim book that remains one of the most unsettling works of social...